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The Schedule for July through Dec. 2025
By Lynn · 1 post · 40 views
By Lynn · 1 post · 40 views
last updated Jun 20, 2025 08:37AM
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The Schedule -- January through June 2018
By Sherry , Doyenne · 13 posts · 81 views
By Sherry , Doyenne · 13 posts · 81 views
last updated Mar 03, 2018 07:28AM
What I'm Reading - January/February 2018
By Mary Anne · 145 posts · 79 views
last updated Mar 01, 2018 06:40AM
What Members Thought
I'm not sure what to make of this one. Definitely well researched, so I did feel I learned something new about a time and place. But it wasn't a story that drew me in. There are three separate narrators - Anna, her father, and Dexter Styles - but the stories never really came together in a satisfying way. This book could have been a lot of things, but the plot seemed very unfocused. A good third of the book is Anna's childhood which does set up the relationship with her father, but the ending do
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More than just a good story well told. More than just a good historical novel.. Themes of loss and loyalty and women's rights are explored in a number of tight intertwining storylines. Anna, son of Eddie Kerrigan, briefly a lover of Dexter Styles and the subject of her own story line binds all of the story lines together. Her father, Eddie Kerrigan is a former vaudvillian who gets involved in the politics of the dockyards in New York during the depression. Things go bad and his disappearance and
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I loved A Visit From the Goon Squad and expected to love this book just as much. I was fine for a little while. A family in New York, dealing with the Depression in 1939...but soon I felt buried in historical details. I love a bit of this, but I don't need five games the kids are playing in the street in that era, or four candies they might have bought in the corner store. Anna is a great character. Sensitive and tough and sexual and ready to do after her dreams. She's the main protagonist, and
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Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach reads like a dime store novel anxious to be film noir and succeeding at neither. It’s the classic case of the Godfather, our protagonists, Eddie Kerrigan, a low-level syndicate informant and Dexter Styles, Manhattan Beach’s club owner gangster, two underworld characters longing to “get out”. The through line for both men is Eddie’s exigent daughter Anna.
Anna meets Styles for the first time on a visit with Eddie to Styles’ home on Manhattan Beach when she is twelve ...more
Anna meets Styles for the first time on a visit with Eddie to Styles’ home on Manhattan Beach when she is twelve ...more
I enjoyed reading Manhattan because it took place in the utopian and imaginary past of the WWII years in the U.S. when the spirit of a just and Great War united everyone. But like all utopian novels, it was ultimately unsatisfying, with too many characters and loose ends. As is often the case, the bad guys were the most interesting people in the book, and there were too few of them.
Then there was the ending, which especially annoyed me. Women writers, why do you insist on using the birth of yet ...more
Then there was the ending, which especially annoyed me. Women writers, why do you insist on using the birth of yet ...more
Messy, overwrought and simply too long. The characters were not interesting enough to hold attention.
Oct 27, 2017
Linda
marked it as to-read
Jan 01, 2018
Celeste
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Jan 20, 2018
Monica
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Jan 21, 2018
Sara
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Mar 08, 2018
Kai Coates
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Dec 09, 2018
Tony
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Oct 18, 2023
Cheryl
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Oct 19, 2023
Mark
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